But you were definitely in there."
"I think I know why." Temple grinned. "Have you been inside his place recently?"
"Me? No. I do not snoop when tenants are off the premises. Although, now that you mention it, I heard a lot of strange thumps from his apartment. Almost sounded like a body being dragged around."
Temple nodded sagely. "A dead weight indeed. I persuaded him to invest in a flashy vintage sofa before I left. It must have found its way home."
"Flashy? Matt? That doesn't sound right. He's such a dear boy and I love him to death.. ..
really, I mean that, though not literally, given your track record with corpses--but sometimes he seems rather naive and a little staid."
"No law against that," Temple said rather briskly. "Sometimes I feel rather naive myself."
"And you all of what--? Thirty?"
"Don't mock me, Electra. Between my recent immersion in murder, among other things, I'm aging rapidly."
"You do look a little peaked."
"Electra, nobody's called me 'peaked' since I was in high school and my mother was on my case."
"Thank you," she said complacently, patting Louie. The cat stretched as long as a yardstick and kneaded his claws against a particularly lurid orchid on Electra's knee.
"Ouch!" she complained. "Cut that out! His claws are sharper than needle-nosed pliers."
"He hasn't been able to run around nights and use them. He was strictly a lap cat in New York City."
"Lap of luxury," Electra said fondly, scratching Louie's chin while he stretched his head back and slitted his eyes. "It's really nice that you found each other," she added.
"Huh?" Temple was having a panic attack, wondering if Electra were as psychic as she claimed her cat Karma was.
But she hadn't detected memories of Max floating among Temple's conflicting thoughts; she was speaking of the current resident male, Midnight Louie.
"He's a great companion," she went on.
"I don't know. He runs around a lot nights and comes in at ungodly hours expecting to be petted and pampered, and usually fed."
"It's a good thing you're solo these days--and nights-- though."
"What do you mean?"
"Louie doesn't strike me as the type to share."
"Louie doesn't own me. I didn't promise to forsake all others when he tripped into my life at the convention center. Actually, he tripped me quite literally."
"Such a rapscallion." Electra tickled Louie's considerable tummy while he rolled under the attention. "Call me a hopeless romantic, but I can't resist these devil-may-care boys in black."
Temple refrained from adding, "Me too."
********************
After Electra had left, Temple sat on the couch idly sorting her mail into intimidating stacks without reading it. Usually she loved diving into a motherlode of hoarded vacation mail, especially when it included notes from distant friends.
"I must be tired," she told Louie, who certainly had the part down pat himself.
The big tomcat sprawled upon his back as languid as Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Temple doubted that even God's lightning bolt could move him. His lazily curled limbs pointed to Temple's intriguingly vaulted white ceiling on which the Las Vegas sunlight played chiaroscuro peekaboo with indoor shadows. One of his back feet was particularly elevated; when he assumed this lounging lion position, Temple always felt she should extend immediate permission for him to leave the classroom to go to the little boys room.
Louie yawned, a major production that revealed a pallid rose blooming on his otherwise black palate.
"It's called a 'letdown,' " Temple told him, dramatically driving her Mexican onyx dagger through another envelope and creating a jagged edge. "Like when actors finish the run of a play, or a PR woman is done with a big publicity campaign or a cat no longer is the toast of Madison Avenue."
Louie blinked. Feline body language always struck Temple as inherently foreign, like a Parisian shrug or an eloquently obscene Italian hand gesture. When a cat blinks, one senses one is being paid a profoundly flattering attention as has not been offered the human kind since Eden. Like Italian sign language, the feline dialect had its ruder side as well, but today Louie was luxuriating. Temple flattered herself further that he not only was attentive to her every thought and mood, but that he was glad to be home.
She sat back and closed her eyes, like Louie.
Letdown. Like when a woman has resumed a romantic liaison without knowing why, or when again or where again or wherefore art thou, Romeo? Max had called her three times at Kit's after leaving New York so suddenly, so literally anticlimactically. So Maximumly.
As usual, he couldn't discuss over the telephone any particulars for his midnight call back to Las Vegas, and in Kit's airy but intimate rooms, Temple couldn't murmur anything but inanities against the background noise of her aunt's pointed attempts to pretend she was too busy elsewhere in the apartment to hear Temple's half of the conversation.
Temple couldn't forget waking up in the hotel whose name she hadn't bothered to remember that post-Christmas morning, its barely glimpsed geometry assembling around her like a dream-scape in reverse, with nothing left of Max but a note and a rapidly dissipating afterglow.
The magician exits, stage left, leaving the audience begging for more, with the lady sawed in half and hanging by a hair.
Wasn't that just the way he had exited eight months before, without explanation, leaving her stranded to defend him? Leaving her to fend off thugs who came looking for him and left her bruised and battered? Leaving her to steadfastly stonewall a Las Vegas homicide cop about any facts relating to the Mystifying Max and all his works?
Temple smiled to recall C. R. Molina's frustration; a petite, feminine woman often dismissed as "cute," Temple had proven a hard case to crack, even for a nearly six-foot-tall lieutenant who was something of a power-suited amazon herself.
Temple's smile faded. Max's abrupt departure hadn't left her simply facing the legal music. It had also left her unsure and lonely, free to meet Matt Devine, new neighbor, new personal project. Temple always wondered what had attracted her to Matt while she was still freshly smarting from Max's defection. Sure, Matt was the handsomest man she'd ever known. And, more rarely, the nicest. Too bad he was also an ex-Roman Catholic priest whose sexual experience came from the confessional. Or was that fact "too good"? Had she been so quickly attracted precisely because Matt was a freshman at the usual single, thirty-something sexual gavotte? Had he merely been a convenient safety zone to idle in while she waited for her true love to ride back for her?
Because she'd always known Max would return. A powerful instant rapport had knocked them both off their feet, professionally and personally: she the repertory theater publicist, he the touring magician. She had deserted Minneapolis stability for the sands of Las Vegas and a freelance career without a qualm, although her family had plenty and let her hear every one.
Now she should be ecstatic. Max was back and better than ever, though the explanation for his absence involved murky international politics a law-abiding publicist couldn't know too much about. And Matt? She had helped him track down personal demons from his Chicago childhood, playing pal, big sister and the sort of sweet-sixteen girlfriend who would coax him a few baby-steps over the sexual threshold and no further until he was ready. Which he might never be.
So here she sat, lost in her own love story, worried because Max's mysterious past made him a more dangerous partner than she could have imagined, and because Matt's present progress had come perilously close to depending solely on her.
She loved Max, but feared that she might not be able to live with what he really was. She cared for Matt, but she worried that he had come close to loving her, and her heart had chosen sides long before she had met him.